Reputation Tracker: Technical Insights

What Doctors Should Know about Local Search Techniques

Most medical practices serve a particular community, and therefore need a website that has high visibility for local searches. Many factors contribute to a site’s ability to rank well: these are some of the most important.

Patient Reviews. User reviews are compelling with people and search engines, and should be given prominent placement on your site.

Directory Submissions. Your website should be registered with Yelp, infoUSA, Superpages and other prominent national, regional and local directories.

Local Citations. Anchor text-optimized backlinks from high authority local sites drives traffic and improves search rankings. Obtaining such links should be a high priority for local optimization campaigns.

Macro Factors. Beyond specific local search attributes, certain high-level factors strongly contribute to a site’s ability to achieve high rankings. These include the age of your domain, keyword optimization, navigational readability, meta titles, and freshness/relevance/depth of content.

Owner-verified Place Page. A key component of Google Places optimization.

Physical Address and Phone Number. Websites should include the practice’s full physical address in text format, so search engines can read the address.

Proper Category Classifications. On Google Places and local directories, it is necessary to select relevant and popular categories for your local listing.

Relevant Local Content. Relevant references to the local community communicate your practice’s legitimate and established presence, which will be reflected in your rankings for local searches.

Optimizing a site for local search involves a lot of detail work and continual updating. Officite specialists stay current with changes in local optimization best practices, allowing us to help doctors stay in front of prospective patients on all of the major search engines.